Georgia attorney general brings new indictment against 3 ‘Cop City’ protestors

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr announced Thursday that a Cobb County grand jury indicted three people for their alleged actions during a 2022 Stop Cop City protest outside the Brasfield and Gorrie headquarters in Smyrna, Georgia. 

Hannah Kass, Katie Kloth, and Tyler Norman were each indicted on two felony counts of criminal destruction of property and one felony count of arson. Kloth, Kass and Norman were all part of a sweeping 61-person racketeering indictment against Cop City protesters filed by Carr’s office in August 2023. The alleged actions by the trio during the May 12, 2022, protest were included as underlying acts in the Fulton County racketeering indictment. 

“This is the next step in our ongoing efforts to ensure that Antifa members who commit crimes in our state are vigorously prosecuted and held accountable,” Carr said at a press conference held outside his offices. 

Brasfield and Gorrie served as the general contractor for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, more commonly known as “Cop City.” The company became the subject of protests in metro Atlanta and nationwide during the multiyear movement aimed at stopping construction of the training facility. 

Xavier T. de Janon, co-director of the People’s Law Collective and defense attorney for several people who have been charged in relation to the training center protests, characterized the indictment as a politically motivated prosecution against the Stop Cop City Movement. That movement largely fell silent after the center opened in April 2025, de Janon said. 

Carr said that the trio joined a group of masked individuals at Brasfield and Gorrie’s headquarters on May 12, 2022. The group allegedly attacked the building with their hands and feet, spray-painted the exterior and threw what the indictment described as “incendiary devices,” causing damage to the building and causing a brush fire. 

de Janon noted the attorney general’s office brought the charges just before the four-year statute of limitations expired, arguing the timing was influenced by Carr’s political campaign. 

Carr is one of the gubernatorial candidates vying for the Republican nomination in Georgia’s May 19, 2026, Republican primary. He has trailed leading candidates in the polls, according to primary polling data from 270toWin, a polling aggregator.

On Dec. 30, 2025, a Fulton County Superior Court judge dismissed the racketeering indictment after determining the attorney general’s office failed to obtain written permission from Gov. Brian Kemp to bring those charges, which is required under Georgia law. The attorney general appealed the dismissal. The Georgia Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear oral arguments in May. 

The Cobb County indictment was brought to the grand jury in the March-April term of court, months after the racketeering indictment was dismissed. 

“Instead of going through the appeals process, which the attorney general picked to go through, now they’re almost retroactively going to the original underlying case and underlying acts to indict them,” de Janon said. 

He also noted that other people had been arrested at the 2022 Brasfield and Gorrie protests and were offered non-cooperation plea deals. 

Carr said his office is “running a parallel track” with the Fulton racketeering appeal and new Cobb indictment, and will continue to prosecute both cases. 

On the other side, de Janon said, “I hope that the defense attorneys of all the defendants continue fighting these cases, because the reality is that this is an attorney general running for office who, in perhaps the last months of his term, is now escalating these almost forgotten cases from four years ago.”